On Wed, 14 May 2008 06:38 Geoffrey Purcell wrote: >Oh, yes, I forgot to mention a couple of other obvious points:- tubers did >become a significant part of the diet once the Neolithic came around, given >the evidence, so it's quite possible that Australian Aborigines acquired that >trait at the time. Besides, last I checked, the Aborigines only entered >Australia towards the end of the Palaeolithic. For the sake of categorization, we say that the Palaeolithic ended and the Neolithic began 10,000 ya. But the terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic are not geological epochs, they are used to describe changes in the lifestyles of Homo sapiens. So hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea and the Fertile Crescent and a few other locations shifted from their Paleolithic lifeways to Neolithic lifeways 10,000 ya. In other locations, the shift took longer. Australia was one of those places where the shift occurred relatively late (and it took an invasion of Europeans to spread it across the continent). Incidentally, the Aborigines may have "entered Australia towards the end of the Palaeolithic", but their was somewhere between 65,000 and 45,000 ya. This is earlier than the arrival of Homo sapiens in western Europe or the Americas. In fact scientists are still trying to work out how it was that the ancestors of the Australians scooted over there from Africa so relatively quickly/early. I should just mention the Tasmanian Aborigines here. They were cut off from mainland Australia when the last Ice Age ended and the seas rose. During their period of isolation they gave up the use of fire and lived on raw mutton birds, mutton bird eggs, crustacea etc. They were not nomadic (down there it snows every winter and the few caves contain middens built up over millennia), but they were certainly Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers through and through until about 1800 - regardless of what point in the Neolithic the majority of Homo sapiens were in. Keith